Trip Database Blog

The clinical cases and images blog has published a quick review Twitter Wins Over RSS? which highlights some of the benefits of twitter.

Due to twitter I came across another post TripAnswers or Twitter?. It’s nice to see we’re being talked about and highlights the usefullness of twitter.

For interest my twitter address is http://twitter.com/JRBtrip

Be warned, twitter is an acquired taste, but once you get over the initial learning curve (not that steep) you may well be hooked. If you try, and get confused, just let me know and I’ll help you out.

A really interesting post at Search Engine Land (click here) about how Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, used Google to keep an eye on new information on a condition he appears to suffer from – Spasmodic Dysphonia.

A new piece of research gets published and the rather nice Google Alerts sends him and e-mail and Scott goes to his doctor.

At long last TRIP Answers is out there, give it a whirl here.

I am absolutely delighted to reveal that Excelencia Clinica has just been released.

Excelencia Clinica is a collaboration between the Spanish Ministry of Health, the Iberoamerican Cochrane Center and TRIP.

In a nutshell, Excelencia Clinica is a search engine based on the TRIP Database. However, it contains material in both Spanish and English and allows users to search in either language.

Historically, TRIP has received a large following from Spanish language countries and therefore I’m very pleased that this new site will give them a much enhanced search experience.

Not being from the USA I do not appreciate the importance of Thanksgiving, I understand that it’s an important festival and it appears to divert attention away from the internet. I say that as I noticed a change in the usage pattern of TRIP (over 20% of our users are from the USA). I then compared that to the year before and the same pattern.

Typically, the usage is a gentle hump with a peak around the start of the weak and a trough on Saturday. The pattern is always the same, the only difference being the numbers. This week it has been a pretty straight line – that is what caught my eye.

In the image below (click to enlarge) I’ve compared 2007 (when Thanksgiving was the 22nd November) to 2008 (when Thanksgiving was 27th November).

I’m a bit of a nerd.

Being a nerd means living and breathing nerdy things. This can be problematic and one acute danger is that your nerdy sources of information hype nerdy things. This is fine if you keep this in the context that, most people are not nerds!

Bottom line is that I often should step back and think whether or not a new technology is actually useful to the general population or whether it really is just for nerds.

I’m saying this in relation to Twitter. I’ve been resistent to try it as I just felt it was too nerdy. However, I recently decided to ‘dip my toe’ and am starting to enjoy the experience. To me, Twitter takes the only useful thing in Facebook – the friend feed (where you say what you’re doing) – and makes that the central feature. You sign-up to follow friends/colleagues tweets and their postings get added to your page. These tweets are a maximum of 140 characters, so brevity is the order of the day.

My twitter page is http://twitter.com/jrbtrip

We’re currently planning the next upgrade to TRIP, hopefully starting work in early 2009 and released 2-3 months afterwards.

We’re being very ambitious with our plans and before we finalise the specification we are very keen to get as much user input as possible. Therefore, if you have any suggestions to improve any aspect of TRIP please leave your comments on this blog or via this form (click here).

Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search has recently been published by Microsoft click here.

Interesting timing (given my last post)

Just-in-Time Information Improved Decision-Making in Primary Care: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background
The “Just-in-time Information” (JIT) librarian consultation service was designed to provide rapid information to answer primary care clinical questions during patient hours. This study evaluated whether information provided by librarians to answer clinical questions positively impacted time, decision-making, cost savings and satisfaction.

Methods and Finding
A randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted between October 2005 and April 2006. A total of 1,889 questions were sent to the service by 88 participants. The object of the randomization was a clinical question. Each participant had clinical questions randomly allocated to both intervention (librarian information) and control (no librarian information) groups. Participants were trained to send clinical questions via a hand-held device. The impact of the information provided by the service (or not provided by the service), additional resources and time required for both groups was assessed using a survey sent 24 hours after a question was submitted. The average time for JIT librarians to respond to all questions was 13.68 minutes/question (95% CI, 13.38 to 13.98). The average time for participants to respond their control questions was 20.29 minutes/question (95% CI, 18.72 to 21.86). Using an impact assessment scale rating cognitive impact, participants rated 62.9% of information provided to intervention group questions as having a highly positive cognitive impact. They rated 14.8% of their own answers to control question as having a highly positive cognitive impact, 44.9% has having a negative cognitive impact, and 24.8% with no cognitive impact at all. In an exit survey measuring satisfaction, 86% (62/72 responses) of participants scored the service as having a positive impact on care and 72% (52/72) indicated that they would use the service frequently if it were continued.

Conclusions
In this study, providing timely information to clinical questions had a highly positive impact on decision-making and a high approval rating from participants. Using a librarian to respond to clinical questions may allow primary care professionals to have more time in their day, thus potentially increasing patient access to care. Such services may reduce costs through decreasing the need for referrals, further tests, and other courses of action.